After you installed WSS on your server, you start configuring. At a point you want to configure the search service, but you can't find the place where you need to configure this.

In your central administration, go to the home page. Then you will find under server topology the name of the server where you installed WSS on. Click on the name and you will be forwarded to the page where you can configure the services on the server. You will notice that the search service is stopped.

When you try to configue this service, it could happen that a general error message is shown. When you click help, you'll get the default WSS help with nothing on this problem. It's hard to google for this problem because you can't find a good error explanation.

When you were lucky and found this post. Try to add the domains before the user names. In my case it solved the problem. Even if it is a local user, place the computer name before the user. To bad WSS doesn't give a simple error like: "unknown user". You don't have to do this for the SQL user when you use SQL authentication.